


Bad for Your Health (Worse for Your Heart)

by Shadowesque



Category: Sonic the Hedgehog (2020)
Genre: M/M, Smoking, potentially one-sided
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-14
Updated: 2020-06-14
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:41:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24720997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shadowesque/pseuds/Shadowesque
Summary: Well, there's at least two bad habits they share: the occasional smoke, and neglecting to say what's on their minds. Stone contemplates and mostly spins in circles.
Relationships: Dr. Eggman | Dr. Robotnik/Agent Stone
Comments: 3
Kudos: 50





	Bad for Your Health (Worse for Your Heart)

**Author's Note:**

> Smoking cigarettes on the roof  
> You look so pretty and I love this view  
> Don't bother looking down  
> We're not going that way  
> At least I know, I am here to stay  
> -"we fell in love in october", girl in red

He'd seen the Doctor smoke before. He had watched him go through periods of extremes: smoking a pack a day; cold turkey quitting for months at a time; covered arms in nicotine patches--far more than the recommended amount, with him mumbling something near-incoherent about the inefficiency of it and how he was going to make a better system one of these days. It remained on the project pile, just near the very bottom that he would, in reality, probably never get around to. So Robotnik smoking wasn't the strangest sight he'd ever seen. Just one more aspect of his addictive personality and bouts of mania, whether chemically enhanced or not.

It was just unusual that he found himself out for a smoke at the same time by complete accident and coincidence. He hadn't even caught the fact that the doctor had started up again, unless it only started today, or he delved into some kind of secret stash for whatever occasion he deemed necessary.

Stone wouldn't call himself an addict. It was a bad habit, sure, and one that wouldn't do his health any good down the line, but he went weeks, months without touching one. It wasn't something he cared to do on the regular, but the hit calmed jittery nerves, soothed anxieties. Balm on an aching joint in a fashion. Sometimes in the middle of the night after an unpleasant dream. Sometimes before a mission.

Nothing so dramatic this time around. Nothing, in fact, he knew he even had to worry about. Something of a performance review, how mundane. His boss (not Robotnik, his boss, but his _boss_ above that, his handler of a sort, the one who put him on this assignment) needed a meeting with him beyond occasional emailed reports, and every time, he found himself afraid that this was going to be it. They were going to reassign him somewhere else, away from Robotnik, like it was some kind of tour of duty and his time was finally up. Certainly enough people saw 'glorified babysitter' as a punishment, and he was the one that had lasted longest, the best at the job. Did that make him one of the oddballs, one of those half-crazed people that made up any excuse to stay in the trenches, bunkers, in dry desert bases with the constant undercurrent of danger? Living off it, thriving off it?

The odds were, however, in his favor that it was merely something completely mundane and boring, and the idea of reassignment wouldn't even be floated. But still, the idea jangled something in his head, and the hit of nicotine and the ache of smoke in his otherwise fairly pristine lungs would make that easier to face.

So it was both of them out on the balcony, Robotnik turning to look at him with mild surprise, lips pulling back from the filter like he about to say something but never actually doing so. Stone stopped mid-step with a fresh cigarette between his fingers, wondering if he should just back it up and head inside and let the Doctor have his time.

They hung there in a suspended moment that must, truly, only have lasted for a moment but felt like so much longer. And then Robotnik's lips clamped back down, and he fished out a lighter from inside his coat, giving it a practiced flick and a wordless offer.

Stone, too, found time once again in motion. He accepted it with the smallest grateful nod, bending toward the flame to catch, to give an encouraging puff. He pulled back, letting a smoky breath out, down, away, demure. Robotnik flicked the lighter closed again, face turned back out toward the view, but instead of putting it away, he rubbed his thumb across a faded design like a worry stone. Smoke curled from his nostrils not unlike an agitated dragon.

It was strange to see him seeming to savor the cigarette. Stone was used to seeing him puffing away frantically, sucking the sticks down like smoke was water and him a dying man. But the way he let the smoke pour from barely parted lips, a slow exhale, into the cool air had all the signs of being downright leisurely.

In a way, it was alarming. Stone wanted to ask what happened, what had gone wrong, what kind of setback had been suffered--but he kept himself quiet, leaning on the railing and tapping away a flick of ash. While Robotnik's smoke was blown up high overhead, higher, reaching, Stone let his sigh out of him and sink low. A thought curled quietly around him that if they both exhaled in the same direction, their wisps of smoke would collide together, intertwine, indistinguishable from one another. He decided he liked that thought too much and kept his head down.

Good enough that they enjoyed each others' company. Or at least, did not object to the company. Fresh air and carcinogens, soft breaths and the subtle rustle of clothing, clouds rolling overhead and the world continuing to turn beneath them. Moments between them, the moments in between, like they were stolen away from business and work and frenetic energy, selfishly used up here and now and burnt to dying flame and ash.

Robotnik finally tucked the lighter away again, disappeared into the darkness of a deeply black outfit. Pressed the bare and ashen remains of his cigarette into the flat of the railing, leaving the butt sticking up at an angle. He turned, toward Stone in fact, and realizing that he was being watched made Stone startle, looking up. The look on that lean face was inscrutable, some form of calculating, and with a puff of his lungs, pushed one last cloud of smoke into Stone's face before storming away back inside.

His eyes stung, and the haze of chemicals and carbon dioxide felt like a kiss.

Maybe it had been some unthinking thing, mind elsewhere, or maybe it had been some kind of belittlement. Didn't matter. Stone shakily exhaled into the remnants of that final breath and watched his fears curl and drift and dissipate.

He looked to the leftover butt, not even disposed of, and picked it up. Wrestled with the unbidden thought of wrapping his lips around it, a second-hand touch of mouths. His next breath was just air, chilled in his lungs, settling like displacing everything dangerous he'd been partaking in. Imagined that the impulse vanished, too, like so much smoke on the breeze, like the last shreds of a hazardous high.

Stone scuffed the remainder of his cigarette and flicked both over the railing.


End file.
